Superpower Diplomacy

Vojtech Mastny

The concept of a superpower was a product of the Cold War and the nuclear
age. Although the word appeared, according to Webster's dictionary,
as early as 1922, its common usage only dates from the time when the
adversarial relationship of the United States and the Soviet Union became
defined by their possession of nuclear arsenals so formidable that the two
nations were set apart from any others in the world. It came to be widely,
though by no means universally, accepted that the very possession of these
weapons, regardless of their actual use, made the two nations immensely
more powerful than any other.

Superpower diplomacy is thus closely related to nuclear weapons. They gave
the U.S.–Soviet diplomatic intercourse its distinct character.
During the years when the United States and the Soviet Union were in
superpower positions in relation to their allies and clients in different
parts of the world, their respective relations with those countries were
of a different order and are therefore usually not considered under the
rubric of superpower diplomacy. These relationships nevertheless
influenced the manner in which Washington and Moscow dealt with one
another.

Superpower diplomacy was a product of particular historical circumstances,
characterized by bipolarism—the domination of the international
system by two exceptionally powerful states locked in an adversarial
relationship. Historically, such circumstances were highly unusual. The
age of the superpowers began in 1945 with the appearance of nuclear
weapons and ended in 1991 with the disappearance of one of the
superpowers, the Soviet Union. The subsequent survival of the United
States as "the world's only superpower" evolved in a
radically different international environment, where bilateralism had
ceased to exist and the concept of superpower diplomacy therefore lost its
original meaning.

Despite its uniqueness and limited life span, superpower diplomacy was
important because it altered and distorted previously established
diplomatic practices by making the conduct of diplomacy dependent, to an
unaccustomed degree, upon a new kind of weaponry that carried with it the
threat of universal annihilation. The dependence tended to impose
oversimplification upon a profession traditionally known for its subtlety,
sometimes raising questions about whether diplomacy may not have outlived
its usefulness because of the limitations placed on it by the crudeness
and excess of the new power it wielded. Although such predictions proved
wrong, the overriding concern with the management of that power left
indelible marks on diplomacy, making it difficult to adjust to an era in
which nuclear weapons continued to exist but bipolarism no longer applied.

While the superpower status of the United States and the Soviet Union
derived from what the two countries had in common, the understanding of
their diplomatic interaction requires constant attention to the
differences that distinguished them from each other. One was a pluralistic
democracy with a government accountable to the people. The other was a
one-party dictatorship ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy accountable
only to itself. At the same time, both the United States and the Soviet
Union defined themselves in different ways as outsiders to the traditional
European system of power politics, which they regarded as alien to their
respective values as well as detrimental to international order.

Twice in the twentieth century the United States attempted to reform the
international system in accordance with its own, specifically American,
model of a democratic federalism. It sought to ensure its primacy because
of its superior economic power and presumably higher morality in an
international system where the interests of all nations would be secured
by generally accepted international institutions and procedures designed
to mitigate and manage conflict.
Unlike the United States, the Soviet state in its early years sought to
overthrow rather than reform what it regarded as an inherently destructive
and ultimately doomed capitalist world order. Soviet leaders originally
believed in a world revolution that would result in a community of states
living in harmony because of their common dedication to Marxist
principles, with the Soviet state as the first among equals. They hoped to
conduct revolutionary diplomacy in conjunction with the management of
congenial communist parties directed from Moscow.

Although both the United States and the Soviet Union had to adapt their
utopian tenets to real life, the idealistic and ideological streaks never
entirely disappeared from their foreign policies, making their diplomacy
different from that of other countries, irrespective of their later
superpower status. The United States, sobered by the rejection by its own
Senate of the League of Nations designed during World War I by President
Woodrow Wilson and the subsequent descent of Europe into another world
war, subsequently attempted to build the United Nations on more realistic
grounds, including a directorate of the main great powers. Once the
concept of a directorate based on collaboration with the Soviet Union
proved not realistic enough, American policymakers became
more—though never entirely—receptive to European notions of
balance of power based on the pursuit of national interest, as propagated
by influential scholars of European origin such as Hans Morgenthau.

Under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union likewise
abandoned in practice its earlier revolutionary utopia in favor of a
foreign policy that instead embraced many of the traditional goals of
Russian imperialism. Under Stalin the Soviet Union became an opportunistic
player in the international system, expanding its territory and sphere of
influence first in collaboration with Nazi Germany, and, after Germany
attacked it in World War II, in collaboration with the Western powers. To
what extent Soviet foreign policy became traditional foreign policy
despite the communist ideology of its practitioners became a tantalizing
question for the United States once the Soviet Union emerged as its main
rival and remains a contentious issue among historians and political
scientists. The opening of former Soviet archives after the end of the
Cold War has made more of them conclude that Marxist-Leninist ideological
preconceptions continued to shape Soviet foreign policy in important ways
until its very end—not so much by determining its goals as by
providing the conceptual framework through which policymakers viewed the
outside world and interpreted the intentions and capabilities of their
adversaries.

Accordingly, the Soviet Union was long reluctant to accept the notion that
there were two superpowers, which implied commonality with its capitalist
adversary as well as permanence of the hostile system presided over by the
United States, with its superior resources. The notion is of Western
origin and was always more popular with critics of the superpowers than
with either of them. In any case, their superpower relationship had come
into being before it was recognized and labeled as such, and neither of
the two rivals was able to anticipate correctly what their future
relationship would be like.

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